Ten years old, running a shop
I was born into a family that ran things. My parents built a convenience store and a vending machine business. My grandmother and grandfather raised me. They worked for the Bulgarian army, and between them they gave me a kind of discipline I've never managed to shake.
I worked in the shop from the age I could be useful. By ten I was telling my mum to go and rest while I ran it: talking to suppliers, serving customers, doing the opening and closing myself. Nobody framed it as a lesson. But a shop teaches you very quickly that a business is not a plan. It's whether the shelf is stocked, whether the person in front of you trusts you, the skill to sell, and whether the numbers at the end of the day are real.
I design for that person now. The one at the counter, deciding.
America, and the thing that changed how I think
At eighteen I joined a student programme and went to the United States. I didn't speak English. I learned it the fast way, because there wasn't another option: two full-time jobs, every wage going straight into the bank. Three and a half months later I came home with $10,000 saved, and went back to my studies.
On my second placement my boss offered me his business to run on commission. I was nineteen. I didn't take it, as I had to go back to my university studies, but something changed in me that day and it never changed back.
In Bulgaria, at that time, the path was a degree, connections, or working yourself into the ground. In America someone looked at a nineteen-year-old with imperfect English and saw somebody who could run the place. That's the moment I understood that opportunity isn't distributed fairly, but it is, sometimes, available. It's why I'm now quite so stubborn about giving small businesses work that's as good as what large ones buy.
Fifty staff, two pubs, and a cellar I knew nothing about
I studied Economics of Infrastructure at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia. In my third university year I moved to England. I had two children there. I met Colin. And together we built and ran a business with over fifty employees across two pubs.
I knew nothing about any of it. Not alcohol, not F&B operations, and certainly not cellar management. So I learned it: leading a team, running operations, managing the cellar, negotiating with suppliers and landing better deals, designing the menus, working service, and being a mother and a partner while it all happened.
It worked. And the offers and menus I designed in that period were the first time I noticed that the thing that was a chore was the thing I actually wanted to do.
Finding the work I was meant to do
Colin and I built up savings and went travelling full time with the children. We were nomads, properly: moving constantly, filming as we went for YouTube and social. I needed something that could support a family from anywhere, so I opened an Etsy shop. There I built my store. I call it my dream world of hand-drawn watercolour and line art illustrations, inspired by the little things that surround us. I love finding beauty in the little things. That's my hobby.
It went further than I expected. More than 10,000 sales in under a year, to customers all over the world, countries I hadn't heard of, a lot of it personalised. And because it was my own shop, I had to do all of it: the product, the brand, the listings, the photography, the marketing, the customer service. Nobody hands a designer that education.
Then people started asking me for other things. Could I design their website. Could I make them a logo. Could I build their brand. That was the point where the thing stopped being a way to support my family and became the work I'd been looking for without knowing it.
Five years of design later, that hasn't worn off. I will still lose an entire afternoon to a curve nobody will consciously notice, and I still find it the most satisfying way I know to spend a day.
Why I work in two languages
Everything we make exists twice. Colin and I work in English. Much of what we build for Bulgarian clients lives in Bulgarian. I move between them daily.
That sounds like a logistics problem. It's a design problem. Bulgarian doesn't sit the way English does: the words are longer, Cyrillic sets differently, and a line that lands in one language can go flat in the other. A layout built for English and then filled with Bulgarian looks like exactly what it is. Most Bulgarian businesses have seen it happen to them.
So I don't translate work. I make it twice, natively, and I accept that sometimes the two versions won't look identical, because the job isn't symmetry, it's that both audiences get something made for them. I've worked in other languages too, on Etsy and since, with the copy supplied or proofread by the client. I'd rather say that plainly than pretend to a fluency I don't have.
What I actually do here
Every brand, website, menu, package, poster and campaign we ship goes through my hands.
What I bring to it that a design studio usually can't is the twenty years before the design. I've stocked the shelf. I've had the supplier conversation. I've watched a menu work or fail on a Saturday night with a full room. When I make a decision about a typeface or a colour or where the price sits on the page, it's a commercial decision wearing a visual one.
Wonder Works grew faster than we planned, and we never marketed ourselves to do it. The first few clients recommended us, then came back for more work done. Most of our clients are long-term partnerships. That's why we cap the number we take on: not scarcity as a tactic, but because the work only stays this good if I'm the one doing it.
And on another note: we choose carefully who we partner with. The design and creative space needs a certain freedom and trust to thrive. I promise we only want the best for you. Our name is on it.
What I won't do
I won't quietly ship something I believe will hurt your business.
If we've done the research, tested it, and the data points one way, and you'd like it to go the other way because of a preference, I'll tell you. Kindly, with the reasoning, and I'll show you what the evidence says. Then it's your business and your call. But I won't nod along and hand over work I know is worse for you, because you're not paying me for agreement.
The same goes for design direction. Intentional design isn't decoration and it isn't taste: every choice on the page is doing a job. If a change would break that, I'll explain what the choice was doing before we undo it.
What I'm still learning
All of it, honestly.
I don't have marketing figured out and I'm suspicious of anyone who says they do. Everything I do is built on deep research first, and then on testing, because the results are the only opinion in the room that's actually worth anything. A lot of what I believed a year ago has been quietly corrected by data since. I've kept studying, business and brand-building courses alongside the economics degree, but the real education is that things I was sure about turned out to be wrong, and I changed.
That's the version of expertise I trust. Not someone who knows everything. Someone who is always willing to learn.